Computers: Let Us Now Praise Famous Hackers

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The overpowering urge to compute, as Levy describes it, has always seemed bizarre to outsiders. At M.I.T. and Stanford the true devotees would skip meals, drop classes and give up sleep and social lives to burrow deeper and deeper into their beloved electronic brains. Once they started on a project, they would regularly "wrap around," working day and night until, after 30 hours, they collapsed on the nearest cot or sofa. Programmers at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab eventually discovered that the space between the roof and false ceiling made a comfortable sleeping hutch, and some of them lived there for months at a time.

Two weeks ago, 130 of America's most devoted hackers gathered in the barracks of a refurbished Army post in Sausalito, Calif., at the invitation of a group of computer experts headed by Stewart Brand, editor in chief of the Whole Earth Software Catalog. Brand's idea was to bring together, for the first time, people from several generations of hackers, and his guests included some of the brightest stars in computing: Ted Nelson, author of Computer Lib, a widely read handbook from the mid-1970s; Stephen Wozniak, who built the original Apple computer; Lee Felsenstein, designer of the Osborne 1; Richard Greenblatt, who developed the LISP machines used in artificial-intelligence research; and Burrell Smith, a one time Apple repairman who went on to build the Macintosh computer.

There were a fair share of shaggy beards, silver-winged baseball caps and even one turban, worn by a Montana-born programmer who now calls himself Sat Tara Singh Khalsa. But for the most part the hackers looked more like backpackers or professional musicians than any stereotype image of computer nerds. By day, they met for discussions and debates that included a face-off between Bonn Parker, a computer-crime expert, and John Draper, the legendary "Cap'n Crunch," who developed a system for making free phone calls by using the toy whistle from a breakfast-cereal box to imitate the tone used by AT&T for long-distance calls. At night the hackers clustered around a dazzling array of computer hardware that beeped and glowed until 4 o'clock each morning.

Most of the weekend conference, though, was spent trying to plot the future of hacking in an industry increasingly dominated by marketers and venture capitalists. Everyone present seemed to agree that commercialism had changed the nature of computing. What was less clear was what the new rules for hacking ought to be. Said Bill Atkinson, author of a flashy new program called MacPaint: "The question is, how do you spread excitement around?"

Many first-generation hackers, having struggled with the red tape that surrounded million-dollar systems in the early days of computing, tended to view such things as copy-protection schemes, which make it difficult to steal programs, as barriers to the free flow of information. Other hackers, however, protested that anyone who spends thousands of hours writing a program deserves to earn royalties on it. Said Robert Woodhead, co-author of a best-selling game called Wizardry: "My soul is in my product."